I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren't here for freedom at any cost. They're here like a startup... Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn't pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell

I get that, and I agree with it in general, but there's literally no company on earth that would approach open source developers with the intent to pay them to work on a closed source product, or to buy out their open source work without having an NDA in place. Hell, even if Meta just wants to pay them to do open source work to support the community, there will still likely be an NDA covering what they can say to the public about the arrangement or anything they learn from having access to internal systems.

It's like saying "Meta has security guards at the doors to their datacenters! They must be doing something illegal in there!"

Meta is evil and is very likely doing something bad with these developers, but the NDA isn't the smoking gun evidence of evil... It's Meta's history in general

I don't know why everyone is so upset about the NDA thing... It's such a standard business practice. Whenever I (a mid tier infra engineer at a mid sized software company) needed to talk to a vendor, get a product demo/consultation, get support on a licensed application, etc... We either sent an NDA to that company or bad one on file already with them. Nobody discusses internal processes, policies or roadmaps with an outside contact without an NDA first. It's literally just a standard business practice.

It could be nefarious, since it's meta afterall, but I wouldn't be shocked if there's thousands of people/companies who have standing NDAs with meta just so they could come on campus and demo their product to some team

I've replaced some "non replaceable" batteries in phones before... Only to find that after about 5 years of medium use the flash storage goes to shit (which causes massive slow downs), the chips begin to desolder themselves, the USB port gets janky and stops charging, etc.

Batteries are a great first step, but damn these $1000+ devices just are not built to last more than 3 years

It's just amazing really. Had they rolled out a reasonable rated plan, and maybe even a discount to highly known apps, and even set a "the price will go up each 6 months for the next 2 years till we reach this higher, but still reasonable price"... All the apps would have added a subscription model for like $0.99 a month and none of us would have really complained.

Like, honestly most of us would have paid and maybe grumbled slightly but said "that's the cost of maintaining this huge community, and I get more than $0.99 in value from it" and just kept shit posting on Reddit all day.

If they wanted to block AI models, limit the API keys to only well known apps or those that are manually verified to be not-an-AI by reddit admins.

It's amazing how dumb a corporation can be sometimes (or has some nefarious endgame ala Twitter)